Tag: Quantum Stuff

When you deposit a quarter and turn the crank on a gumball machine, the flavor you receive is basically random. In math, sometimes a polynomial, like x2 + y2, works the same way. When you plug in numbers for x and y, the values the polynomial takes might be random. Other polynomials might favor particular… Continue reading Mathematicians Find Structure in Biased Polynomials

GLASGOW, Scotland—As climate talks race toward their conclusion, a concerted push by vulnerable countries to shake the world into taking action against intensifying threats from the sea and sky might be inching forward on the world stage. For days negotiators have huddled in windowless rooms trying to hammer out deals about funding and winding down… Continue reading Adaptation Becomes Focus of Climate Summit as Talks Draw to a Close

All around the world, sewage gushes out of pipes into rivers and the sea, threatening the health of humans and aquatic ecosystems. Though some individual sites have long been known to be major sources of coastal pollution, “we’ve never had a global understanding of how big the problem is,” says Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at… Continue reading Half of the World’s Coastal Sewage Pollution Flows from Few Dozen Places

Yet the task may not be impossible. Just as currents in the Escher-like ocean can be deciphered from their shadows on its boundary, perhaps theorists can read the inflationary story from its final cosmic scene. In recent years, Baumann and other physicists have sought to do just that with a strategy called bootstrapping. Cosmic bootstrappers… Continue reading Laws of Logic Lead to New Restrictions on the Big Bang

People who are into physics and follow blogs actively have surely ran into MIT physicist Scott Aaronson, probably most well known for his critiques of the alleged D-Wave quantum computer. More recently, Scott has been writing a lot about consciousness, but his latest post – prepared talk notes from the Quantum Foundations of a Classical Universe meeting – is a… Continue reading “Could a quantum computer have subjective experience?” by Scott Aaronson — Mostly Physics

Maynard Okereke is using his distinctive voice to fight the lack of minority representation in STEM Credit: Maynard OkerekeAdvertisement For many of us, the past year and a half may have seemed to slow way down. And in fact, some studies have shown just this. But Maynard Okereke’s life has been anything but slow recently.… Continue reading This Engineer, Actor and Science Communicator Is Giving Science Its Rap

Mathematicians draw bifurcation diagrams (the simplest look like pitchforks) to analyze how the states of a system respond to changes in their parameters. Often, a bifurcation divides stability from instability; it may also divide different types of stable states. It’s useful in studying systems associated with mathematical chaos, where small changes in the starting point… Continue reading A New Theory for Systems That Defy Newton’s Third Law

Remember domino theory? One country going Communist was supposed to topple the next, and then the next, and the next. The metaphor drove much of United States foreign policy in the middle of the 20th century. But it had the wrong name. From a physical point of view, it should have been called the “sandpile… Continue reading The Math of the Amazing Sandpile – Issue 107: The Edge

Researchers reported last month that an inexpensive, widely available pill substantially reduced hospitalizations and deaths in a large study of individuals with mild COVID symptoms who were at high risk for complications. It is the only existing oral medication with promising peer-reviewed data from multiple randomized COVID trials—and it is already used by millions of… Continue reading Investigating Antidepressants’ Surprising Effect on COVID Deaths

Because opportunities to monitor those areas are so hard to come by, their recordings were “super precious data, and exciting,” Boebinger said. The researchers had hoped to be able to fill in details about how the brain transforms the low-level sound representations in the primary auditory cortex into more complex representations of speech sounds in… Continue reading The Brain Processes Speech in Parallel With Other Sounds